


you'd be the one to set me free

by mosaicofhearts



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Domestic, Fix-It, Getting Together, Kissing, M/M, Post-Canon, eddie kaspbrak is feral, kissing fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:15:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26551234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosaicofhearts/pseuds/mosaicofhearts
Summary: He doesn’t know if he’lllikekissing Richie. A part of him is assuming not, based on the experiences he’s had for - oh, just the entirety of his adult life - but he at least wants totry.Richie is looking at him now, expression expectant. Waiting for him to say something, he realises, because he’s been staring at the table and mulling over his own thoughts for too long. He can see the return of the nervousness in the slope of Richie’s shoulders and instantly wants to take it away again.“I think that we should kiss,” he says boldly, stomach twisting in the same way that he imagines falling from a great height would feel. Invigorating. Terrifying. “I want to try.”“You wanna - yeah. Uh, yeah, we can do that,” Richie swallows audibly. Eddie tracks the movement of his throat, mouth drying in an instant.It’s this - these moments - where he suspects that, actually, he might like kissing Richie. He might like kissing Richie a lot.---Or, the Kissing Fic.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 33
Kudos: 457





	you'd be the one to set me free

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was born from a thread i made about eddie discovering how much he likes kissing when he and richie get together post-derry, so - enjoy!
> 
> the entire point of this is them kissing and being in love. there's very little plot here. seriously. on twitter i've referred to this as 'kissing fic' for weeks now. on google docs it was title 'kithing'. it's about the KISSING.
> 
> some warnings for mature content (nothing explicit), allusions to homophobia, mentions of sonia kaspbrak and her behavior... the usual, but nothing too hard! it's really just a soft fic about kissing!

When Eddie Kaspbrak had been eighteen years old, he’d made a ‘Life Plan’ for himself. A highly detailed and thoughtfully constructed plan of action for the next sixty years of his life (with a safety net for seventy, if he was lucky, though he hadn’t particularly thought he would be - luck wasn’t a facet of life for Kaspbrak men, pitched somewhere down the list between good health and successful marriages). 

It had started off as a purely mental list that had grown until his mind couldn’t be trusted to hold it in its entirety; the process of detailing the plan down on paper so that he had an actual physical copy had been almost exhilarating. Chronological order, a check box beside each item, life events that would have to be met and celebrated before he could view himself as victorious in the joyless game of existence.

For the first twenty one years thereafter, the ‘Life Plan’ would be followed almost to a tee. He’d attended college not far from home so that he could still be close to his mother (an exercise in bargaining between the two, with Eddie having just been relieved that he would not be prevented from going to school completely), achieving a degree in business. Sensible. Smart. Forward-thinking. 

Not long after graduation he had met Myra, and they’d been married within the year - Sonia had loved her. Eddie had thought he might love her, in the way that a person could feel particularly fond of an animal or a sentimental souvenir. Not quite the fountain of romantic love that he had been  _ told _ about, but he’d figured  _ fuck it _ . He’d always been a little bit different. Not loving his wife the right way was the least of his problems when it came to things that were Wrong With Him, as far as he was concerned.

Together, they had bought a medium sized house in an ‘up and coming area’ of New York City - at least according to the realtor, though it would take a good ten years for that prophecy to come to fruition - and Eddie had walked into a graduate level job at a major insurance company in the heart of the city. His mother had hated New York. In fact, everyone who knew him (which was admittedly not many) seemed to be of the opinion that New York and Eddie Kaspbrak were an odd mix.  _ Too busy _ , they’d say.  _ Too grubby _ .

They’d simply made him want to love it even more, and he had. 

For twenty one and a half years, to be exact, Eddie had ticked item after item off of the ‘Life Plan’, relishing in the deep satisfaction that each thick swipe of permanent marker gave him. He was doing things  _ the right way _ . Things rarely went wrong for him. He had what he needed. He and Myra had never had children, but then neither of them had ever seemed keen on the idea anyway. In every other aspect, he had curated the perfect life for himself. A life that someone on the outside could look upon and find impressive.

Halfway through the twenty second year after the creation of the ‘Life Plan’, the whole thing gets tossed out of the window by a short but heart-stopping phone call from an old, unbelievably forgotten friend: a small car crash that will definitely impact on his insurance premiums,  _ for fucks sake _ : a flight to a town that he had always promised himself he’d never have to return to: the humiliating truth of coming face to face with a person who makes him feel more in two days than his wife has made him feel in almost  _ twenty fucking years _ .

The problem is, his ‘Life Plan’ is not the sort of thing that can be picked back up when it gets thrown off track as royally as this. The whole damn train has been derailed, and it’s hurtling down a path previously unknown to Eddie, and maybe that would have been okay at twenty, when he didn’t really have his life in order, but at forty it feels like someone else is pulling the invisible strings attached to his stupid puppet limbs and getting a real kick out of fucking everything up for him. He wants to hit the brakes but there don’t seem to be any (what kind of a  _ train _ doesn’t have brakes? A metaphorical one, apparently). 

The series of events that take place prior to and upon his return to Derry are the sort of things that turn your world upside down and inside fucking out and spit it back in your face like: here. Here’s your life back; it’s a lot different to the life you had before, and you might find yourself wifeless, homeless and jobless, but that’s kind of all your fault anyway. Deal with it. Good luck.

Funny.

Kaspbrak men don’t have  _ good  _ luck, remember?

\--

When Richie tries to tell Eddie he loves him, Eddie beats him to it.

He knows. Somehow, he knows what Richie is going to say the moment his breath stutters in his throat and he braces himself against the chair in his kitchen that Eddie hates because of its wonky legs - (“ _ It’ll kill someone one day. Probably you, because you can’t sit on a fucking chair properly, _ ” he’d said, and Richie had laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world). 

It’s only been a matter of months since he’s had Richie back in his life, but he knows and he can’t let him do it first. 

Maybe it’s the competitive edge that has never burned from Eddie’s spirit, his inability to let Richie get the better of him at any fucking thing. Or maybe it’s because he feels like he’s been choking on the words for the past three months and now - finally - he’s ready to breathe again.

Whatever it is, it propels him forward, cutting Richie off before he can get further than the ‘Eds’ that seems to be permanently on the tip of his tongue.

“I love you.”

He doesn’t say: I don’t know how I ever lived without you. He doesn’t say: I can’t believe I thought I knew what love was. He doesn’t say: I wish I’d been brave enough at thirteen to tell you what I wanted but I don’t think either of us would have made it out alive if I had. He doesn’t say: I almost fucking died down there and I didn’t want to, I didn’t, but I’d do it all again if it meant that you were going to be okay. 

He doesn’t say any of that, but Richie looks shell shocked enough that Eddie thinks he hears it anyway.

Three little words. 

They never meant much before, not to him. They were comfortable; presupposed of him by others, and a required undertaking within the trajectory of most relationships. This understanding stemmed from mechanically reiterating the words to his mother as a kid before he was even allowed to leave the house, the profession of love a duty that he had resigned himself to since he was eight and had once tried to rebel against it by fleeing without pressing a kiss to her dusty cheek and telling her he loved her. 

The days of guilt tripping afterwards had not been worth the small taste of freedom he had had in that second.

Then there was Myra. 

Again, it had always been a chore, though not in the same way. Myra had never  _ tried _ to make him feel bad on the odd occasions that he forgot to say it, but the guilt had always found him anyway. It became a part of his everyday routine, in the end: wake up, brush teeth, eat breakfast, grab coat, say ‘I love you’. Go to work, come home, say ‘I love you’. Easier to remember when he filed it away as a task along with everything else in his life, because nothing felt more satisifying to him than ticking off a fucking checklist every day.

Not even sex. But, uh -  _ well _ . That makes a lot more sense to him nowadays anyway.

Now, standing here in Richie’s gaudily decorated white-with-lime-green-accents kitchen in Chicago, because he left his wife and New York in that order with nowhere else to go but  _ here _ , across from a pale-faced, stricken Richie who looks well on the way to passing clean out in front of him, Eddie feels the full weight of those words for the very first time in his life.

It would be a problem, he thinks - just another to add to the already colossal list of  _ problems _ he has - if it wasn’t for the fact that he knows Richie returns the sentiment tenfold.

Now that he has his memories back, it’s a lot easier to see. When they were kids and teenagers roaming around the streets of Derry with either a shit ton of cares or no cares at all, depending on the day, the month, the season (that summer had been the worst by far, but there had been an infinite amount of the short end of the shitty stick deals they’d had to handle growing up)... everyone had known Richie and Eddie came as a package deal. Two for one. Buy one get one fucking free. 

And when he thinks about it - how much he had wanted Richie’s attention back then, how much he had wanted to be the focal point of Richie’s entire universe, so that all he could see through those thick-rimmed, ugly fucking glasses was little Eddie Kaspbrak. How much fun he had had shouting and yelling at Richie whenever Richie did something stupid or gross or just plain  _ wrong _ because he knew it would get a reaction that Eddie was only too happy to give, kicking and screaming and more alive than he had ever felt since birth. How, at the end of it all, no matter how much bickering they did, no matter how many dirty, stinking socked feet were shoved in faces, they would still always come together to defend one another against the bad guys. Bowers’ gang of pock-skinned, greasy-haired adolescents, or the demon clown sent from outer space to feast on the flesh of children - whichever,  _ whoever _ it was… they’d find themselves together, at the end. 

Richie would say “ _ it’s every man for himself _ ” when all the while he was clutching at Eddie’s hand like it was a lifeline.

Because the loss of one of them would never be worth the life saved. 

It scares Eddie, a little, that he still feels that so strongly. Like, if Richie had not come back from Derry but he had, life wouldn’t be anything worth living.

So, when Richie says it back - ‘I love you’ -, Eddie already knows. He thinks  _ Richie _ knows he knows, too, but he says it anyway; like not getting the words out would be an impossible kind of agony for him, like he’s held it in for such a long period of time that now the words are incapable of being held back. 

He doesn’t so much as say it, but hiccup his way through it, cheeks marred with twin wet, salty lines, the force of his tears making it almost impossible to really comprehend what he’s saying - but it’s fucking endearing. Eddie’s fine with it - the crying. Richie cries a lot, actually. Usually, when he does, it’s because he’s  _ happy _ , like maybe he never thought he would be and the fact that he is is too overwhelming for his body. Instead of being contained it pushes and pushes at the surface until it’s revealed in displays such as this; always with the tears, often with the blubbering, sometimes with snot, too, just for added flavor.

Eddie should find it disgusting. He does, sometimes - mostly just that last part, because bodily fluids have never been his favourite thing, especially not when expelled from the nose. But he deals with it. He hands Richie a tissue, or he wipes away the mess across Richie’s face  _ himself _ , because he loves him. Because he isn’t sure Richie’s ever had permission to express himself before this, folding any emotions deemed as ‘too real’ or ‘too deep’ into a box and letting everyone see only the jokes instead.

Richie as a kid and Richie as an adult aren’t so different in that sense. 

At least  _ now  _ Eddie can put his arms around those big, broad fucking shoulders of his (nobody needs that much fucking width, he’s built like a shit house and Eddie would complain about it a lot more if he didn’t get to  _ touch _ now) and look him in the eye and tell him he’s a fucking idiot whenever he tries to backtrack on genuine comments and tearful moments with half-assed jokes.

It turns out that neither of them are very good at understanding the concept of  _ deserving _ things - like love is something to be earned and not something to be received unequivocally, even when it is freely given so. But, after everything, Eddie thinks that they do deserve this. That they have permission to live the lives they never had, now, to make them better than they ever dreamed. And if he wants to make his life with Richie fucking Tozier, so be it. His life has been without want for so long that allowing himself this one, crazy, reckless, monumental thing isn’t so hard after all.

So, life moves pretty fucking quickly when Eddie leaves Derry for the second time, and absolutely nothing that happens fits into his ‘Life Plan’. Which, honestly, he’s still pretty fucking pissed about.

Turns out, you can’t really plan for a killer clown coming back from the ‘dead’, or the sudden realisation at forty that you’ve been gay this entire time and in love with your childhood best friend whom you didn’t actually know for twenty seven years of your life, or the ensuing divorce, move across the country, and job loss.

His eighteen year old self would have had a panic attack disguised as an asthma attack had the thought ever even crossed his mind.

\--

Somewhere between confessing his feelings for Richie hard and fast like it was a race to the finish, and deciding to stay permanently in Richie’s apartment with him rather than finding a place of his own in Chicago, Eddie loses his nerve. 

He thinks it’s pretty fucking rich of his mind to decide to start panicking about the state of his life  _ after _ it convinces him that it’s a good idea to completely uproot everything about it. Each wizened root buried deep into the ground reflecting a piece of him - or a piece of his life, at least, up to now. One for the city that he called home since leaving Derry; one for the wife who never felt like home; one for the mother who would be rolling in her grave for the mess he’s making; one for the job at the same company he’d walked into fresh out of college. 

The first had been the most difficult to remove, the one that had taken the most time. Eddie thought of it as akin to pulling teeth, extracting the diseased and rotten bones before they could ruin the other perfectly healthy ones, too.

By the time the roots had come up, they were already blackened and dead. Entrenched strongly in the soil, but not having thrummed with life for many years.

When he’d managed to take one, the rest had come up pretty easily. And it had felt freeing - Eddie can’t pretend that it  _ hadn’t _ . Of course it had. There’s nothing not fucking liberating about leaving a life that you’d only ever settled for, a life that had never impassioned you. The most exciting part of his week had been finding out whatever surprise dinner Myra decided to cook on Friday nights, deviating from their otherwise planned meal times, and he’s aware how  _ sad _ that is. He doesn’t need any reminders.

It still feels freeing. He doesn’t regret anything that he’s done post-Derry.

He does, however, regret that his brain is a living organism that he can’t turn off with the flick of a switch, just for some peace and quiet sometimes. 

Two weeks into the ‘Very Dramatic Love Confessions’ (a name coined by Richie, which Eddie had vehemently argued against the first five times, before giving up and admitting that  _ yeah _ , fine, they were pretty fucking dramatic), and nothing has really  _ changed _ .

It’s a problem. A vast, distinct problem as far as Eddie is concerned, but he can’t tell whether it’s a problem for both of them or just for him and that, in itself, is another problem.

Look, it’s not like Eddie expected them to be at each other like teenagers when they’d gotten over the slight obstacle of having to actually express their feelings for one another, but he’d been expecting more than them sitting on the couch with a metre of space between them, retiring to their separate beds at night, sitting across from one another at the table with the most minute touch of their socked feet causing Richie to redden and splutter and immediately move away like he’s been electrified.

Eddie wants to ask him  _ what the fuck is wrong with him _ , but he thinks he should probably work out what the fuck is wrong with  _ himself _ first. People in glass houses, and all that.

He knows, distantly, in a faraway kind of manner that’s very telling of the fact that he doesn’t want to acknowledge it, that he’s entirely inexperienced, and the thought of doing anything remotely sexual with Richie is - well, more terrifying than attractive right now. It’s not like he’s a complete idiot. He’s  _ Googled _ . He’s watched some educational videos that do not call themselves pornography but, in a sense, probably are. He’s considered the pros and cons of getting into bed with Richie in this way (pro: it’s Richie and he loves him; con: it’s Richie’s  _ dick _ and he doesn’t know what to do with that yet). He’s drawn up a shopping list of items that they’ll presumably need when the time comes, and he’s examined the logistics to make sure that he, at least theoretically, knows what’s expected of him, and of Richie in that situation.

But.  _ Big _ but.

They haven’t even kissed yet.

It’s been two weeks of them pussy footing around one another in the enclosed space of Richie’s apartment, embarrassment and nervousness giving way to some truly awkward encounters, and Eddie’s had  _ enough _ .

Confessing was always supposed to be the most difficult part of this. Confessing was the thing that kept Richie up at night (something Richie has admitted to him now, in the ensuing moments of tender intimacy they have where they actually  _ talk _ , even though neither of them have quite mastered the art of eye contact whilst doing so). Confessing was the thing that, had Eddie ever thought about it before he had actually done it, would have had him writing up an essay to himself on his notes app on his phone to convince him that it was a bad idea.

But they’ve done the confession, and the gap between them seems larger and harder to bridge than it ever has before.

Rationally, Eddie knows that this is a two person game, that he can’t expect Richie to take the reigns entirely - except he does, because Richie has known himself to be gay a lot longer than Eddie has and he stubbornly thinks that that should be enough. Richie  _ knows _ what he’s doing here, surely! A lot more than Eddie does, that’s for sure!

It’s unreasonable to make these assumptions, but it doesn’t stop him from bitterly thinking them everytime he looks across at Richie over the dining table and wonders when he’s going to make a move. If this  _ was _ a game, Eddie would be winning. He’d been the first one to say ‘I love you’. He doesn’t think it’s unfair of him to expect Richie to be the one to move them into touching territory that is not strictly platonic, which is apparently all they’re doing  _ still _ .

“Why are you looking at me like that? Have I got something on my face?”

From the island in the centre of the kitchen, Richie sticks the length of his tongue out of his mouth and goggles his eyes grotesquely. He’s stirring a pot on the stove that smells divine, a trail of sticky crimson sauce travelling down the side of the metal that makes Eddie’s eye twitch. Richie can fucking cook now. It’s incredibly unjust how appealing that is to Eddie.

“Yes,” he replies automatically. “A rat has crawled onto your upper lip and died.”

Richie’s bordering on five days stubble accentuates the sharp slope of his jaw and makes him look absurdly handsome, but Eddie decides tenaciously not to point that out and to pretend that he hates it instead. The more he keeps it up, the longer Richie will wait before shaving, so it’s a win - win by all accounts.

“I’m attached to him. I’ve decided to call him Robbie. My face is his home now.”

“You should evict him before he brings more squatters.”

“But then he’d be homeless,” Richie frowns at him, somberness exaggerated and dipping into his wrinkles. “I don’t think I could live with himself.” The spoon in his hand drips sauce all the way down the handle until it’s settled in his palm, and Eddie watches with mixed emotions of abject horror and desire as Richie licks it instead of wiping it away like a normal person.

He wants Eddie dead. It’s the only plausible explanation that Eddie can come up with in the moment for his behaviour. When they were kids, he swore that Richie was put on the Earth purely to be the bane of his existence. Now, he  _ knows _ it, even if he’s the bane of his existence for entirely different reasons, and Eddie wouldn’t change it for the world.

Except he’d add more touching. He could really do with being touched by Richie - something more than their usual shoving of shoulders or bumping of hips  _ please _ \- , though he imagines that it would feel almost painful with the force of how good it is.

“What if  _ I _ can’t live with you?” Eddie growls at Richie aggressively. Too aggressive for the conversation, probably, but fueled entirely by his currently messy thoughts. “What then?”

Richie puts the spoon down in the pot, turning to Eddie with an expression that is just as serious as the last but shades more genuine. “Eddie, my love,” he says, and Eddie can’t decide whether he wants to kill him or kiss him more, “if it’s a choice between you and Robbie, I think you know who I’d choose.”

Kiss, he decides, eyes flickering down to the pink swell of Richie’s lips, fuller than his own and flecked with dry skin even though he’d gone out of his way to buy Richie a honey flavored lip scrub made with all natural ingredients that he clearly hasn’t used. He doesn’t know why he bothers.

Unfortunately, he’d still like to kiss Richie regardless of whether he moistorises his fucking lips or not.

“Obviously it would be Robbie.”

Eddie picks up the nearest thing he can reach, which happens to be a fork, and throws it towards Richie’s turned back. It falls just short, either because he didn’t put enough effort in, or because he didn’t really want to hit him. It’s more for show than anything. “I’m shaving you in your sleep.”

“Now that’s an incredibly sexy thought,” Richie sounds contemplative, almost as though he’s not truly paying attention, stirring away at that damn sauce and not paying a blind bit of notice to the way that Eddie stiffens in his chair, every tendon in his body suddenly tightened. “Please, tell me more about your desire to bring sharp objects into the bedroom, Eds.”

It isn’t a sexy thought at all. Except it is - it really, really is. The thought of being close enough to Richie to touch, to cradle his face gently but firmly in his hands, tilting it this way and that, Richie going easily with the pressure. The intimacy behind performing such an act of care with someone; the trust that Richie would have to hold in Eddie to allow him to do something like that. He can picture it - Richie which his face tilted up towards him, assurance married with apprehension in his eyes, giving himself over to Eddie and his sometimes unsteady hands to a moment of closeness between them that Eddie craves.

It’s a bizarrely pure thought, yet it leaves him struggling for breath still. And, then, another thought, a stabbing irritation - 

“Which bedroom?” Eddie mutters, instantly cringing inwardly. Immediately he wishes that he could take it back just hearing how petulant his own voice sounds.

From his seat at the island, he can see the red that creeps up the back of Richie’s neck, all the way to the tips of his ears, catches the way those thick fingers clench around the ladle. At least he’s not the only one embarrassed by it, but it’s  _ frustrating _ . Maybe Richie loves him but doesn’t want him that way, or maybe he loves him but not in the way that Eddie wants.

Both thoughts leave him feeling hollow and alone.

“Uh,” Richie replies finally, twisting at the hip. He isn’t looking at Eddie, like he can’t meet his gaze, which is  _ bullshit _ . 

Despite the rising humiliation that Eddie’s pretty sure is going to make him throw up any minute now, he stares resolutely at Richie’s face, almost daring him to look him in the eye. He feels both satisfied and disappointed when Richie doesn’t.

“Do you -,” Richie starts but doesn’t finish, a new sentence forming instead. “What are you, uh -”

It’s almost pathetic. 

The strange bitterness within Eddie begins to dissipate into sympathy as he looks at Richie floundering at the stove, dropping sauce from the spoon all over the newly cleaned floors (Eddie  _ just _ put the mop away, but he doesn’t have time to be anything more than mildly annoyed about that now). With his mouth gaping and gormless, Eddie imagines that this is what a fish out of water looks like. He looks ridiculous and rumpled, wearing that stupid silk dressing gown that Eddie  _ knows _ he only bought because it looks the same as the one Hugh fucking Hefner has (“ _ it’s ironic _ ,” Richie had said, “ _ because I don’t fuck women _ ” and Eddie had never wanted to chew on glass more than in that moment), open and revealing his chest, which is probably unhygienic but something that Eddie has a) gotten used to during the past few weeks and b) enjoys too much to complain about.

In a split second, Eddie decides to take pity upon him, gathering up some more courage from  _ somewhere _ , though he had really thought he was all dried out of the stuff by now.

“What are we doing here, Rich?” His tone is snippier than he intends, softening his gaze when he looks at Richie to take away some of the bite that he can’t seem to prevent. “Because it’s been two weeks and I’m starting to wonder what the fucking point was.”

More context would probably be good, he thinks, but it’s clear from Richie’s expression that he knows what Eddie’s referring to anyway. He turns back to the stove in a move that makes Eddie frown, wondering wildly if he’s being dismissed, feeling raw at the insinuation, before he realises that Richie’s just turning the stove off. He watches as he battles with the switch, fingers slipping on the simple motion.

“I guess…” Richie says when he’s done, waving his hands haphazardly. “I mean, I don’t know what you want from me, man! We didn’t exactly set out the ground rules, or whatever.”

“ _ Ground rules!? _ Ground rules for  _ what _ , Richard? Our relationship?”

The word appears to be the cause of the full body flinch that crosses over Richie. Eddie swallows down the regret, digging his fingertips into the cool countertop of the island. 

So. It’s not like they’ve talked about this. It’s not like they ever said that they’d be together, labelling themselves as something romantic - but he’d  _ assumed _ , okay?! What else was he supposed to do? The embarrassment comes back in waves, a tsunami of ‘oh fuck’s’ and ‘oh shit’s’ and ‘what was I thinking’s’. He’s spent the last two weeks thinking that they were moving into pleasant but unfamiliar territory, even without the usual behaviour that Eddie suspects comes with the word ‘relationship’. 

He wants a meteor to hit the Earth and take them all with it so that he doesn’t have to live through this conversation, and so that nobody else will be around to remember that it ever happened. Selfish, maybe, but he’s never claimed to be a fucking saint.

Richie moves forward to stand on the other side of the island, really looking at Eddie now. Eddie wishes he wouldn’t.

“Well… yeah, Eds, you seem like the type to have ground rules for this sort of thing. You probably have a ten year plan for your life, all typed up and colour coded on a spreadsheet, and I don’t - I mean, do I even fit into that?”

It’s a little too on the nose. Uncomfortably so. Eddie chooses to ignore the part about the life plan and the spreadsheet, though he already knows that his silence on the matter will be taken as confirmation and Richie will be incredibly smug about it later, if the two of them manage to survive what is looking to be a distinctly agonising conversation.

“I thought,” he snaps instead, breathing deeply through his nose. “That you would have gotten the answer to that when I told you  _ I loved you _ .”

It’s his fault, probably. He should’ve known. Richie was always a bit too dense when it came to matters of the heart.

A smile breaks across Richie’s face, enough to chase away the last glimpse of nervousness from his eyes. “Could’ve been a bit more clear.”

“What’s not clear about ‘I love you’? Please tell me.”

“‘I love you’ doesn’t mean ‘oh, Richie, you’re the love of my life and I want to spend the rest of my life with you and wait on you hand and foot,’” Richie grins gleefully, reaching across to grab the salt. “You should have said.” The sauce is bubbling away despite the heat being turned off, the smell almost a distraction

“I have never and will never say that.”

“But you do want this to be a relationship? You want to be boyfriends?”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. Not in disgust - it’s not a bad word, and it doesn’t instigate strong feelings of distaste within him. It’s strange, though. They’ll have to try it on for size, maybe, or think about what else there is - partners? He’s not sure he likes that, in truth. It sounds too formal. Too secretive. It may have taken him forty years to come to terms with his own sexuality, but that doesn’t mean he wants to hide it now.

“I thought we  _ were _ ,” he admits, mouth a thin line. “What did you think this was all for?”

It’s a sheepish expression that takes over Richie’s face when Eddie looks at him this time; an uneasy shrug of his shoulders as he sprinkles salt and pepper into the pot, stirring it for good measure. “I was waiting for you to tell me what you wanted.”

On the one hand, it’s almost reassuring to know that Richie hasn’t gotten any better at this since he was a teenager.

On the other hand, Eddie wants to hit Richie atop the head multiple times with the sauce-soaked ladle until he gets a damn clue. Frustration brings his brows together into a deep crease and tightens his lips even further. He’s in love with an idiot. He  _ knew _ that, obviously, but now it’s just cemented as truth.

“Why were you waiting on  _ me _ ? Why couldn’t  _ you _ be the one to make the move, jackass?”

Richie raises a brow that says ‘are you stupid?’ and brings the ladle to his mouth to taste. “You just left your wife, your job, and your home. You didn’t even realise you were gay. Kinda assumed you’d wanna move at your own pace, bud.” He waves the ladle around, apparently not satisfied with the taste because he adds more salt. That amount of salt is probably terrible for them. Eddie resists the urge to complain.

He’s eyeing another utensil near him for Richie dropping the word  _ bud _ in a conversation about their less than platonic feelings for one another, though.

“I didn’t want to put any, like… pressure on you,” he continues, rubbing at the back of his neck. From his vantage point, Eddie can see that it’s a pretty shade of red.

It’s his turn to blush, however, heat rising to his cheeks quicker than he can duck his head in an attempt to hide it, rubbing at a non-existent spot on the counter. 

He wants to protest - really, truly he does - but he can’t, because it makes sense. He doesn’t like the idea that he’s being treated with  _ kid gloves _ , but Richie’s right - not that Eddie is planning on admitting that aloud anytime soon. It has only been a few months since he saw Richie in Derry and realised that the incessant beating of his heart was not something that could be chalked up to just seeing an old friend after so many years apart. He’d felt like he’d been walloped across the back of the head with the mallet that Richie had used to draw attention to himself, the discordant ringing of the gong more felt than heard by Eddie.

It had been even less time since he’d come to the definitive conclusion that he was, in fact, a gay man, and probably should start living as one after all this time stuck in marriage as exciting as his job; which is to say, not at all.

Lack of experience with other men - and god, the thought just makes him flush, an uncomfortable embarrassment that is quickly followed by a white hot electricity that starts at the base of his skull when he thinks of  _ Richie _ , specifically - aside, Eddie knows that there’s also the whole sex thing in  _ general _ .

Because he’d always just assumed he wasn’t interested, and Myra had always been content with that. They’d had sex of course, especially in the beginning - once a week, maybe, when they’d first began dating, scheduled and coordinated, a day always set aside for them to get the deed done. Like it was something that they both acknowledged they ought to do, but didn’t particularly look forward to.

In the last few years, that number had dwindled to once a month at best, and it had never been a problem - not like it was for other people, the kind who went on trashy daytime talk shows to air their issues with one another out in the open (Eddie had stumbled across a few of these programs on the odd Sunday afternoon spent alone, and they were addictive,  _ sue him _ ). Myra had never been pushy or demanding about sex, which Eddie had found to be a great relief. It had been perfectly adequate. Nothing to shout home about, but not terrible; enjoyable in the same way that a walk beneath the shade of trees on a balmy day was. Comfortable. Familiar.

He’d never felt bitter that sex wasn’t everything people cracked it up to be - conversations between teenage boys on the matter had always left him squirming and inwardly horrified, the thought of bodily fluids and putting  _ what _ where making him believe, from a young age, that it wasn’t going to be for him. No thank you. No sir. He was  _ fine _ with that.

Now, for the first time in a long while, he worries about it.

He doesn’t know if he’ll  _ like _ kissing Richie. A part of him is assuming not, based on the experiences he’s had for - oh, just the entirety of his adult life - but he at least wants to  _ try _ .

Richie is looking at him now, expression expectant. Waiting for him to say something, he realises, because he’s been staring at the table and mulling over his own thoughts for too long. He can see the return of the nervousness in the slope of Richie’s shoulders and instantly wants to take it away again.

“I think that we should kiss,” he says boldly, stomach twisting in the same way that he imagines falling from a great height would feel. Invigorating. Terrifying. “I want to try.”

“You wanna - yeah. Uh, yeah, we can do that,” Richie swallows audibly. Eddie tracks the movement of his throat, mouth drying in an instant.

It’s this - these moments - where he suspects that, actually, he might like kissing Richie. He might like kissing Richie a lot.

Attraction always seemed so fickle to him. A cop out. He’d never been  _ attracted _ to Myra, but more to the idea of her and what she could provide for him. He’d figured that that would be the extent of any attraction he ever felt, but he’d been  _ wrong _ \- and jesus, fuck, he’s so glad for that now, no matter how absolutely bat shit crazy it makes him feel. Because he looks at Richie and he feels a tug in the pit of his stomach, feels his skin prickle with goosebumps, his eyes fill with hunger. He wants to know intimately the sensation of stubble against the soft of his cheek, against the criss cross of tissue there that will never heal. He wants to get all up in Richie’s space and stay there forever, pressed in between Richie’s legs with his head tucked into the crook of his neck, inhaling the scent that makes him mad with a want he’s never known before.

It’s alarming to feel this way after a lifetime without it. And maybe he’s scared that it won’t last; that when he gets a taste he’ll wind up back at square one saying, ‘no, sorry, not for me’ all over again.

But.

There’s always the possibility that he won’t.

It’s this that solidifies his resolve, working his jaw into something looser so that he doesn’t look like he’s about to be put to death by firing squad, rather than squaring up for a first kiss that he does actually, definitely, undoubtedly want to have.

“Okay, good,” he says. “Come here, then.”

“Now?” Richie squeaks, looking caught. “Right now?”

Eddie rolls his eyes, huffs out a frustrated breath. “No, dumbass, I meant next week - say, Tuesday, at 5.35pm, how does that work for you?  _ Yes, now _ .”

“Wouldn’t put it past you to schedule in our first kiss,” Richie mumbles. But then he does as he’s told, wiping his hands on his jeans and moving away from the stove.

He’s still sitting down, Eddie realises belatedly, getting to his feet in a graceless motion, the chair squealing across the tiles with the abrupt force of it. He feels like he has a fucking straight jacket on, the way he’s standing like he’s been called to attention and can’t move a muscle for fear of losing a fucking limb. Deep breaths. One, two, three -

And then Richie is standing in front of him, shuffling closer like he’s not sure whether he’s allowed, and that’s all it takes for the tension to evaporate from Eddie’s entire body, soft where he’s often too narrow, too sharp. He’s hopelessly endeared to this idiotic, beautiful bastard of a man, who looks like he could bend Eddie in two but never would (unless he asked, maybe, and  _ that  _ is a thought, but definitely not the kind he wants to have right now, unless he wants to pop a boner, which would be mortifying considering they haven’t even kissed yet).

“Like this?”

Eddie raises a brow. “I know you know how to kiss someone, Tozier.”

“Are you calling me a slut?” Richie gasps into the sliver of a gap between them. There’s a shaky note to it, the only hint that he’s putting on a front.

“Maybe,” Eddie’s already distracted, barely knowing what he’s responding to. He reaches out to graze the lapel of Richie’s open shirt.

They’re close now. Inches rather than feet between them, but he wants it to be millimeters, to be nothing. He wants Richie to share his space, wants to force his way across any perimeter that Richie sets around himself; wants every part of his skin to be touching some part of Richie’s, and even then it won’t be enough. Nothing could ever be enough. 

Resolve stronger, he ignores the tremor of his hands and tightens his grip, raising his other hand to curve around the side of Richie’s neck. He feels the jump of muscle beneath his touch, eyes flickering up to Richie’s for approval or consent or  _ something _ . In Richie’s eyes, he sees the surprise there, how fucking wide they are behind his glasses. He presses forward, just a little, just enough so that Richie knows his intention for certain, and he sees it, then; the blown sabre of his pupils almost engulfing the blue beyond.

_ He _ did that. 

It’s exhilarating, a thrill shooting through him and that - that’s interesting. He hadn’t considered the thought before, that making someone else  _ horny _ would affect him too, would make him feel good too. 

“Is this okay?”

“It would be better if we were kissing, but I can’t complain.”

Huh. 

Richie Tozier has always talked a big game for someone who seems unable to bridge the gap himself.

There’s a dab of sauce at the corner of Richie’s lip. If it were anyone else, Eddie would find it disgusting, but instead he wants to taste. Everything he thought he knew about himself, Richie seems to be hell bent on proving wrong, even without knowing he’s doing it.

It all comes down to this: the hummingbird beat of his heart, the pumping of blood around his ears, the arid landscape of his mouth, the white of his fingers curled so tightly into Richie’s ugly plaid shirt.

This could prove to be the worst decision of his life, he thinks, which is saying a lot, when you take into account the fact that he willingly went all the way back to fucking Derry to fight an alien clown for the second time in his life. But it could be the best. He likes to live his life in certainties and knowns, in constants and stables. None of those words could apply to this.

He isn’t sure how long they’ve been standing there, breathing in each other’s air, but it feels like a lifetime. 

“You’re overthinking,” Richie mumbles. He taps a finger gently atop Eddie’s head, his smile a crooked crescent and completely fond. “We don’t have to-”

“Shut up,” it leaves him abruptly and a little gruff. His fingers clench around the material of Richie’s shirt, still held between his fingertips. “Don’t say anything.”

And then he pushes himself to the tip of toes in order to surge forward and up, pressing his lips to Richie’s so that he  _ can’t _ say anything, a muffled  _ mmph _ of surprise all he can apparently manage.

As far as first kisses go, it’s fairly insubstantial. A chaste slide of lips, his own catching against the dryness upon Richie’s; pleasant, if a little awkward. The angle isn’t quite right, and Eddie emits a groan of frustration, before he’s using the thoughtfully placed hand on Richie’s neck (and really, he should thank his earlier self later) to tilt his head down and to the left, at the same time that Richie’s tongue traces the closed line of Eddie’s lips. He opens his mouth on instinct, more than anything, and oh.

Oh, that’s better. That’s definitely better.

His socked feet hit Richie’s as he tries to close the now non-existent gap between them, fingers flexing against Richie’s throat. The wet hot of Richie’s mouth is way more fucking inviting than Eddie had ever thought it would be, and he lets their tongues meet in an act that lacks decorum and is inherently messy. He doesn’t think Richie minds, if the whine caught in the back of his throat is anything to go by.

There are big hands spanning the width of his waist on either side suddenly, the heavy warmth of them eliciting a sound of his own that he’ll be embarrassed about later, but is too busy to care about  _ right now _ . He’s always liked Richie’s hands. So much larger than his own, has dreamt of holding them, but now he’s going to be dreaming about them on him, smoothing over every inch of his skin, and he shudders against Richie’s front at the mere thought of it.

Through his shirt he can feel the heat flowing from Richie’s hands and his body, where they’re pressed together, chest to chest. For a moment, Eddie thinks he might actually be delirious - his mind spinning with the fact that  _ this is actually happening _ . When he nips at Richie’s lower lip it’s primarily an accident, but the way Richie stiffens under his hands makes him want to do it more, harder, sharper, anything to get Richie reacting like that again and again.

Everything is Richie. He can smell him, the cedar and sandalwood of the shower gel that Eddie insisted he buy him; he can taste the peppermint of his toothpaste marred with the sweet tomato from the cooking; he can feel the scratch of stubble against his skin, can feel every point at which their bodies are connected like an electric current, despite the layers of clothes. The slick slide of their lips reverberates around his mind, and he should hate it, how  _ filthy _ it sounds, but it’ll be the new soundtrack to every wet dream he ever has, he’s sure of it - those sounds coupled with the beating of his own pulse and the groan that Richie looses when Eddie’s free hand finds it way to his hair.

It’s the way Richie maneuvers him backwards, pressed against the table. It’s the way Richie meets him halfway, holding him by his waist like he’s supporting, not asking for anything. It’s the way he wants to crawl inside Richie’s body and never fucking leave, so that they might never have to be apart again.

Eventually, the edge of the table digging into his lower back gets painful and impossible to ignore, and the need to breathe for longer than a few seconds at a time before they both start suffocating takes over. 

The separation isn’t awkward, like Eddie had thought it might be. It’s a slow stop, the gentle press of lips over and over again, like maybe Richie can’t bear to pull away quite yet either. It’s the tide coming to lap at the shore after the swell of the storm.

“Please tell me we’ll be doing that again,” Richie is first to break the quiet that follows, because of course he is, looking a little bewildered and a lot delighted. “Like, more than once.”

“Yeah,” Eddie nods. He feels light headed enough that he laughs, a quiet, disbelieving thing. “If you think you’re getting away with not doing that, you’ve got less brain cells than I thought.”

Then, Richie is stepping away, out from the warmth created by both of their bodies, back to the stove, whistling a jaunty tune that sounds suspiciously like ‘Come on Eileen’. Eddie misses him instantly; wants to berate himself for it but can’t. Now he knows what it’s like to be close to Richie, he knows that he has a problem.

Now that he knows what it’s like to  _ kiss _ Richie, he has an incredibly serious and possibly life threatening problem. Because  _ what _ is the point of any minute that he’s not kissing Richie Tozier?

\---

The constant, burning desire that Eddie has to be near Richie intensifies into an insatiability over the course of the next week, unlike anything he has ever felt before.

A part of him - that seems pretty fucking naive now that he thinks about it - had thought that any need he had to kiss Richie would just… disappear. Of course, he’d run the consequences of doing so in his head first, had evaluated that, probably, that need would only grow after the first kiss, at least for a few days. You don’t get a small taste of something you’ve wanted for God knows how long (even without knowing it) and then just  _ forget it _ . But a few days. He’d thought that a few days would be enough for the rabid fucking monster in him to crawl back into its’ home between his ribs and only resurface when he damn well  _ let it _ .

It’s a mistake. A very bad mistake. Not one that he regrets, because Eddie doesn’t think anyone could possibly regret kissing Richie, but one that he wishes he had taken a little more care with. He doesn’t make mistakes. Every choice he makes in life is made because he has assessed the risks and decided upon the best option for himself that way. Pros and cons. Risk and reward. Basic investment business principles that he’s been working with for the last twenty years of his life. Mistakes aren’t things he makes, because he’s witnessed other people make them and learned what  _ not _ to do.

Up to now, these are principles that he’s been able to apply to every aspect of his life. Even in recent times, the risks behind leaving Myra and moving to Chicago and quitting his job at a lifetime firm to get a new one in a city he didn’t know - he’d spent weeks pouring over the details, calculating everything in a way that most people would find absolutely insane. He’s got spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of data just for the past few months of his life. 

But now, here, with Richie, trying to apply it to  _ this _ ? It’s impossible.

Because the rewards always outweigh the risk. 

Logically, Eddie knows this to be untrue. Logically, the risk of kissing Richie and never being able to stop does not make the reward worth it. That would be unsanitary and exhausting and he doesn’t actually want to spend the rest of his life attached mouth to mouth with another person, for a huge list of reasons that he’s not ready to go into right now.

Illogically, the thought of kissing Richie and not stopping feels like the best way to spend the rest of his life. It feels like a reward for a lifetime of childhood trauma and oppressive parenting and moving through a life that never felt like his; like wading through a grey, thick fog that never lifted enough for him to see clearly that it wasn’t.

After all of that, maybe this is just what the world owes him. Just maybe, he’s allowed to dream of kissing Richie. He’s allowed to want that. He’s allowed to reach out with both hands and take, because it’s what Richie wants too, because they’re giving themselves to one another completely when they never thought they’d have this.

Unfortunately, as  _ Hallmark  _ romance as that all sounds, it’s not enough for Eddie to blindly follow.

“Chocolate or strawberry?” 

“Huh?” Eddie says unintelligently, lolling his head back on the couch to look at Richie. Or an upside down version of Richie.

It’s still Richie, and any Richie is good enough for Eddie.

Even a Richie who is shaking two different boxes in front of Eddie’s face irritatingly. “Chocolate or strawberry? Or are you actually going to drink that alien vomit?”

Huffing, Eddie pulls himself into an upright position, scowling at the grin that Richie wears. “Don’t fucking call it that when I’m about to  _ drink  _ it, jackass! It’s kale.”

“It’s green.”

“Yeah, no shit. Kale is green.”

Richie stops shaking the boxes of what Eddie presumes to be flavoured milk, looking put out on his behalf. “I just don’t think you should be drinking anything that looks like it’s been ejected from the depths of an alien planet. No food should be that colour.”

“Greens are healthy,” Eddie says automatically. “You’re literally drinking sugar in a glass with those. Your dad would be disappointed.”

“Good genes,” Richie shrugs, tapping at his canine with a fingernail as though to prove it. “I have excellent teeth. Got ‘em from my mom.”

“You won’t be saying that when they all fall out.”

“Yours are gonna fall out one day, too, you know. You can’t fight old age with leafy green vegetables.”

“I can try,” Eddie tilts his chin upwards, a defiant pose never lost from childhood. He thinks he sees the moment Richie recognises it, too, the blue of his eyes hazy. “Anything is going to be better than  _ that _ .” He points accusingly towards the boxes, lips twisted on a grimace.

Richie’s already walking backwards into the kitchen, holding them aloft. He should really watch where he’s going, and Eddie bites back the urge to tell him so.

“Ah, but they taste so good, though! Who cares about what they’re doing to my insides?”

“I care!” Eddie yells back, even as Richie disappears around the corner. He hears the exaggerated ‘ _ aw, Eds, I didn’t know you felt that way _ ’ still, his lips twitching. “And you should care too! I’m not paying your medical bills.”

He would. Not that he would ever need to, considering Richie definitely has more money than either of them could ever need, which is saying something considering that Eddie hasn’t done  _ badly _ for himself. Richie’s just on that celebrity money that keeps coming in, after the apology interview and the coming out article. It turns out that he’s more popular now than he was before, and even if some of that comes from ‘greedy corporations scavenging on the carcasses of the LGBT movement’ (Richie’s words, not his), nobody’s going to be turning that away.

Richie was surprised at the outpouring of support he’d received; surprised further by the praise that had followed when he’d started getting back out there with his own written material, telling his own jokes and stories. Long gone were the days of comphet. Eddie hadn’t been surprised. He, out of everyone, had known that Richie Tozier was strongest when he was at his most genuine; funniest when he was at his most real. His own jokes had always landed better than the ones adapted from others, even when they were kids, even when Eddie was shouting at him and telling him he was gross and crude and terrible.

“As long as you still nurse me back to health,” Richie’s grin is wide and unbearable when he returns, a bright pink milkshake in hand. “I’ll cover the bills. You get the costume.”

He doesn’t even bother to try and avoid Eddie’s wrath - he leans right into it instead, curving his way around the sofa to sit beside Eddie in the vacant spot left there for him on autopilot, even when Eddie kicks at him roughly for the previously made comments. They’re still  _ them _ , still bickering and demanding of each other’s attention, except now it’s given more freely, without the flush of embarrassment that always came when they were kids (for Eddie, at least).

_ There’s something wrong with that boy _ , Sonia had said once, eyes narrowed and hawklike as she watched Richie’s retreating back leave her lawn.  _ You should stay away from him, Eddie. He’s not good for you. He’ll make you wrong too _ .

Distantly, he’d known what she had meant, even then, the ever present danger that lurked sable black and merciless in his peripheral vision whenever he looked at Richie too closely, whenever he let his gaze stop on knobbly knees and unbrushed hair for a second too long.

Now, at least, he knows. The only thing that ever made him  _ right _ was the losers, Richie included.

“I think you can probably hire someone online to do that for you.”

“Won’t you be jealous, Eds my love?”

Eddie grins, sharp toothed and biting. “Not if I’m not here I won’t.”

“You wouldn’t leave me?” A gasp emits from Richie’s chest, exaggerated. “I can’t believe you’d do that to me in my hour of need.”

“If you tried to get me into a nurse costume? In an instant.”

“What if it was my dying wish?” Richie wheedles. He takes a sip of his milkshake, leaning forward to put it down on the coffee table. Without even thinking about it, Eddie is there, pushing a coaster across for him before the bottle hits wood. 

“Don’t say that,” he says, words spilling out a little too quickly. “Neither of us are dying anytime soon.”

Except one of them almost had.

“Hey,” Richie’s voice is soft and low and closer than it was a few moments before. 

It sounds closer, at least; Eddie can’t tell if it actually is because his eyes are shut, an immediate reaction to thinking about Derry, about the sewers, about the searing pain of being fucking  _ impaled _ .

Richie tries again. “Eds? Love, can you look at me?”

He wants to. He only ever wants to look at Richie now, like Richie’s the star of every damn show Eddie’s ever wanted to watch, and now he gets him in real life too. But he’s thinking of filth and blood and salt slicked cheeks so much now that he can  _ smell _ it. He wonders whether he’ll see it, if he opens his eyes.

A few months have passed, sure. But still sometimes Eddie has to wonder whether this is just another trick of the clown. He doesn’t  _ think _ that they’re still down there in the sewers, fighting for their lives, but he could be, couldn’t he? There’s nothing to prove that he isn’t. Time and time again, the clown has proven that he can make them see things that don’t exist, that aren’t actually happening, that could never be real.

This? It’s enough of a pipe dream that he has to consider the option.

The hand that presses itself gently to his cheek is jolting, despite the lightness of the pressure. It’s a touch, nothing more, but his eyes open with a start, and then Richie is right there.

He’d complain, if it were anyone else. Where the fuck does anyone get off pressing their face  _ that close _ to another person’s, especially when said person is clearly going through something? But it’s Richie’s face, and that is apparently enough to stop that thought in its tracks.

Relaxing into the touch, Eddie looks into the deep pools of Richie’s eyes. He swears he can see stars in them from this range, flecks of colour that seem to shimmer beneath the surface of the crystalline blue. There’s a tenderness there that nobody else ever dares to wear when they look at him. A tenderness that he half wants to shy away from and half wants to give himself over to. 

When Richie looks at him as though he is something precious, it is somehow opposite to the way his mother used to look at him. Eddie doesn’t feel breakable beneath Richie’s gaze. He doesn’t feel as though he is something fragile, ‘HANDLE WITH CARE’ stamped all across his body in fluorescent red ink, smeared in places where he has tried to wash it away over the years. Nothing ever worked. But here, with Richie, it’s like those words vanish from view.

Richie looks at him like he is majestic. Invaluable, needing to be coveted and appreciated, but still strong. Not like he needs to be hidden from the world and everything that it has to offer.

He feels the muscles flex along his back as he shifts, and he thinks Richie could be right.

“There you are,” Richie says, his fingers sliding along Eddie’s jaw. His voice is careful but he’s not quite mastered the art of hiding his concern. Eddie wouldn’t want him to, either. “You back with me?”

“Always,” It slips from his lips before he can second guess it, before he can scoff at himself for being so ridiculously infatuated with someone that idealistic words and phrases come to him easily now, apparently.

He sees the moment Richie’s face starts to shift into an expression that is bound to be half love-addled sap and half amused taunting, and he can’t - Eddie can’t let it happen. He’s not about to sit here and be ragged on by someone who told him that his face was the best thing to wake up to just this morning (that’s infinitely more embarrassing,  _ Richie _ is infinitely more embarrassing than he is).

He’s still scowling when he kisses Richie this time.

Again, a kiss to shut Richie up. He could blame it on that. His mind supplies it as a perfectly reasonable excuse to use when questioned about the ‘why’s of this scenario. But, truthfully, he’s been wanting to kiss Richie again since the last time. Looking back at the past week, Eddie doesn’t think there’s really been a moment where he  _ hasn’t _ been thinking about what it would be like to kiss Richie for a second time. And a third time. And a fourth, and a fifth, and - so on. The picture is very fucking clear for everyone to see.

It’s better from the very beginning, this time.

There isn’t any need for realignment. Like they fit together just perfectly. Like after only one kiss they already know how to meet in the middle, how to meld their lips together, how to do this like it’s second nature to them. Eddie thinks it might be. 

His hands fist in the soft cashmere of Richie’s teal sweater (one that Eddie demanded he buy, because obviously Richie would never have bought something so expensive and so lowkey himself). He’s glad he did now, fingers curling into the material as he tries to shuffle across the sofa towards Richie without having to break the kiss.

As though he knows instantly what Eddie wants, Richie’s hands reach for him, strong and firm around his waist. He tugs and Eddie goes, a rush of lightheadedness hitting him from the sheer power of the movement, and the way that he himself goes so easily. He shivers, pressed up against Richie’s chest and wondering what it would feel like if there were less layers between them. Skin on skin. Another shiver, Richie’s hands rubbing along his sides gently.

It’s pleasant. It’s more than pleasant. But what Eddie really wants is for Richie to grab him so hard that he might leave fingerprints. He wants Richie to slide his hands up underneath Eddie’s shirt, pulling it from where it’s tucked neatly into the waistband of his pants, and he wants Richie’s fingertips trailing along every piece of sensitive skin that Eddie has to find there.

The thing is, Eddie’s been thinking about kissing Richie so often and for so long now that it’s too easy for him to forget that they  _ haven’t _ actually been doing this for long. Two kisses, that’s all. Just because Eddie has been daydreaming about kissing Richie on the couch and up against the kitchen counter and in the car and in  _ bed _ \- doesn’t mean that they’re actually there yet.

Oh, but it feels good.

Richie’s lips are as dry as expected against his own, but the drag that the roughness provides is more pleasurable than not. His tongue begs for entry at the crease of his lips and Eddie gives it so willingly, a whine in his throat erupting unbidden, his hands still tightly clenched in Richie’s sweater. He’s going to stretch it out, he thinks deliriously. It’s going to look awful and he’ll have to get a new one, but he thinks he’d get Richie a hundred new sweaters if he got to keep doing this forever.

Though if Richie didn’t have any sweaters there’d be an increasingly higher chance of him being topless more often, and that’s a nice thought. Very nice.

“Eds,” Richie pulls away to say, looking like he might have something else to follow it up with, but Eddie feels deranged, pulling him back in for a kiss again.

Incredibly rude of him, but he thinks Richie might forgive him.

Richie’s arms tighten around him, one hand slipping to his lower back, and Eddie arches into it on instinct, whining again quiet and high. Closer. His head swims with the need to get closer, and maybe it’s that coupled with the element of surprise that gives him the upper hand when he does exactly that. He shifts up onto his knees, and then he’s flinging a leg around Richie’s waist on autopilot, straddling him - he’d hate the thought, would cringe at it, if it were anyone else, but it’s the sexiest thing in the world when it’s Richie beneath him.

A noise of surprise sounds from Richie’s throat, and he does pull back again then, chest heaving as he falls back into the sofa. Eddie makes to move forward, but he’s stopped easily by Richie’s hand between them, the palm pressed lightly into Eddie’s chest.

He looks down at it with an expression of abject confusion for a moment. What’s the problem? As far as he can tell, there isn’t one. In fact, things look pretty fucking great from up here in Richie’s lap, looking down at his face - a face which is upturned towards him and flushed from the neck up, those eyes still soft but with a hint of wariness too.

Oh.

Eddie swallows, embarrassed suddenly. Fuck, he’s an idiot. Usually, Richie’s the idiot, but this time it appears  _ he _ is. Well. It’s a relationship. It’s all about balance and sharing, isn’t it? Maybe they have to share the title of idiot from time to time too.

“Eddie,” Richie says, but Eddie cuts him off, quickly.

“Sorry. I don’t - uh. Too much?”

“No!” Richie shakes his head vehemently. His hands are still touching Eddie, at least, cupping his hips now, the heat of them palpable but not quite as intense as they were before. “I mean - maybe?”

Even though Eddie was the one to suggest it, it makes him flinch all the same. He squirms, pressing a hand onto Richie’s wide, broad shoulder for leverage as he tries to get up, but Richie’s grip is steadfast, stopping him.

“Rich, come on,” he half pleads, jaw set. “This is humiliating enough, just let me go.”

“Humiliating?”

“Yes, Rich,  _ humiliating _ ! I’m here like some  _ hussy _ -”

“ _ Hussy _ ?” Richie snorts, though he chokes it back down when Eddie glares at him. “No, come on. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just thinking about you, that’s all.”

Eddie, incredulous, stares at him. “Thinking about me. How, exactly, are you thinking about me?”

A pained expression crosses Richie’s face, head tilted backwards against the couch as he avoids Eddie’s gaze. It’s unfair, frankly. Eddie’s the one putting himself out here, but Richie stills looks like  _ he’s _ been caught doing something wrong, his hand in the cookie jar when mom already said no. 

Narrowing his eyes, Eddie chops at his chest. “Richie.”

“It’s a lot, okay!” Richie groans, gesturing between them wildly. “I don’t want you to regret this, so I don’t think we should jump into anything more right now!”

Warm affection wrapped in realisation sinks into Eddie’s stomach. He sits back on his haunches, his hand still on Richie’s shoulder, Richie’s still on him. Of course Richie would be worried about this, and Eddie doesn’t think he can blame him. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind that he doesn’t actually want to get out of, but it’s a lot. It is a lot. He’s not the only one in this, he realises instantly.

He’s spent so long assuming Richie to be experienced with this sort of thing, expecting him to take the reigns, that he never considered the alternative; that this is just as overwhelming for Richie as it is for him. 

“Okay,” he nods, settling back down, the previous discomfort settling. “You’re right. I just-” Want to kiss you. All the time. Non-stop. Constantly. “- don’t know what I’m doing yet.”

It’s not a lie. Neither of them seem to know how to navigate this. 

Taking Richie’s hand in his gingerly, Eddie resists the urge to duck his head and hide his flushed cheeks at the display of attentiveness, interlocking their fingers and looking Richie in the eye like an adult, because that’s what they are, even when it’s hard, even when Eddie feels like he’s newborn and only just finding his feet in life.

In a way, he supposes he is - they both are. This is a new life. A  _ better _ life, if they want it to be. Looking at Richie now, and the way Richie is looking back at him, more open than Eddie would have ever expected to see him, he knows what they both want. He wishes, not for the first time, that they had tuned into this wavelength between them more as kids. Maybe things would have been different.

Maybe they wouldn’t have.

“I know,” Richie is saying, carding a hand through his hair even though Eddie will bitch at him for it later, when he looks in a mirror and sees how ruffled it is. “You think I do? I don’t know jack shit, Eds.” He grins sweetly, brow raised, and Eddie can’t help but smile back. “We’ll work it out together.”

With a roll of his eyes, Eddie presses a chaste kiss to Richie’s cheek, lingering there for a moment, before he rolls off of Richie. He doesn’t retreat to his side of the sofa, though, still holding onto Richie’s hand, curling up into the warmth of Richie’s side instead. He fits easily. Richie’s arm is a comfortable weight across his shoulders, and he presses his face into the crook where Richie’s arm meets his shoulder, and inhales. It should be gross; probably is a little gross to anyone else. But to him it smells like Richie. Strawberry milkshake and cinnamon from his oatmeal this morning (another of Eddie’s introductions to Richie’s life, obviously) and, now, mint lip balm from Eddie’s own mouth.

“What are we watching?” 

He can feel the rumble of Richie’s chest beneath his head as he speaks, and Eddie smiles, where only he can see it.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “Whatever you want.”

He’ll regret that later, when Richie inevitably puts on some z list zombie movie with too much fake blood and a lot of screaming, but for now, he’s too lost in the feeling of Richie beside him, content to stay here wrapped up in him until one of them has to move. It’s inevitable. It can’t be stopped, but that doesn’t prevent him from quietly trying to figure out a way to do exactly that.

\---

In the weeks following, the need within Eddie cools to a constant simmering in his blood, less aggressive and not nearly as intense. He’s got a handle on it, he thinks, even though he’s not sure for how long, exactly, he’ll be able to say that. 

They kiss now daily, a healthy, wonderful, spectacular addition to their relationship that Eddie is extremely fucking happy about, because now he can kiss Richie whenever he wants and Richie is always ready to reciprocate (until it gets to a certain point and they stop, every time, which is fine with Eddie. He’s not really ready for anything more just yet, as good as the kissing is).

It still drives him insane, despite the fact that he has permission and an apparently unlimited amount of kisses he’s allowed to give and take every day.

Sometimes, it’ll hit him out of nowhere. Like a lightning bolt straight through his head to the tips of toes, entire body vibrating with this searing energy that compels him to get his hands and lips on Richie at any cost. He shoves him against the kitchen counter, feeling only slightly bad about the way he catches him off guard, soothing away any ill feeling with a hungry kiss. When they’re on the sofa together it’s almost impossible for him not to just sidle across and reach for Richie; even worse when they’re in bed together, which they are a lot now, even without doing anything remotely sexual. Cuddling. There’s a lot of that. Richie’s strong, big arms wrapped around him, caging him in so that he has to shuffle and squirm to turn enough to get a kiss in. He likes it, though. It’s part of the appeal, having to work for it sometimes.

Kissing, he’s learning, is definitely  _ not _ as overrated as he had always thought. He’d always looked at couples who kissed constantly as being exaggerated somehow, like they were trying to prove to themselves and everyone around them that they were in love by how often their lips were attached. He’d never really considered that they did it because they really liked it as much as they seemed to, but he gets it now. It’s half impossible for him to look at Richie without wanting to kiss him, his eyes dropping down to Richie’s mouth when he speaks, too distracted to focus on what Richie’s actually saying.

So, kissing makes him rude and selfish, evidently. And he’s not ready to stop, so he guesses everyone is just going to have to put up with that.

Whenever he kisses Richie, even when Richie is caught off guard by it, he’ll still reach out for Eddie like it’s automatic to him, like he can’t think of anything else he’d rather do. It makes Eddie’s chest clench, similar to the way it feels when he’s having a panic attack, but much, much nicer. He kisses him not just for the act of kissing, of moving their mouths against one another, but for everything that comes with it, too - Richie’s hands on his waist, the small of his back, sneaking into his hair when he knows Eddie’s too distracted to give a fuck in the moment. He holds on so tightly sometimes that Eddie has to wonder what he’s thinking, even as he’s going weak in the knee and wondering whether the rabid beating of his heart is a warning that he’s going to have a heart attack right there and then.

Richie holds him like he doesn’t want to let go; like he’s scared that he might have to.

Eddie both hates it and gets it in equal measures. He’s a hypocrite to feel like Richie’s insane for thinking it, because he thinks it too - but it is insane to him that Richie might think that Eddie would ever disappear on him now. There’s nowhere Eddie wants to be but  _ here _ . But the fear is there in the back of his head that this will all come crashing down around them somehow, because when has anything ever gone  _ right _ for them?

They’re shopping, and Eddie’s attention should be on the list he’d painstakingly toiled over the night before (because Richie’s never fucking prepared for this shit, he’d rather push their cart up and down every aisle in the grocery store and just throw in whatever catches his eye, which is  _ criminal _ ), but instead he’s watching Richie from his peripheral. Richie’s shaved for the first time in a few weeks, finally, only lasting this long because he likes to piss Eddie off. He didn’t hate the half-grown beard. It had grown on him.

Now, though, he’s wondering what Richie’s soft, freshly-shaven face will feel like rubbed up against his own.

He’s unhinged, he decides. Something in his brain has been severely addled - probably from the childhood trauma, almost definitely from the near death experience of being shanked by a fucking clown. Because that’s probably not a normal thing to think, that he wants to rub his face up against Richie’s to see what it would feel like now that he’s already catalogued the feeling of stubble and beard and everything in between into his mind on numerous occasions.

He doesn’t quite have a spreadsheet. It’s a purely mental catalogue. He has been giving kisses scores out of 100 in his head depending on setting, time, intensity, and Richie’s level of facial hair. It’s not something he’s ever going to admit aloud because he likes to have a certain amount of dignity, but none of the kisses have scored below a 90 yet. Richie has a stellar GPA when it comes to making out, which is both fortunate and unfortunate for Eddie.

“Hey, Eds,” Richie says, his voice bordering on an innocence that Eddie should pay more attention to. “What do you think? Not as impressive as mine, eh?”

When Eddie turns, it’s to find Richie standing to the side of the cart with an eggplant in each hand, his brows waggling exaggeratedly and his mouth breaking on a stupid, smug smile. He’s an idiot. Eddie has lost count of how many times this exact thought enters his head on a daily basis, but it’s apparently not enough to have him changing his mind about all of this. Nothing in the world could make him change his mind about Richie.

Not even the obnoxiously purple vegetables he’s currently holding aloft like they’re Oscars or Golden Globes, or whatever award Richie’s going to be nominated for this year, because he’s aggressively talented when he wants to be.

“I wouldn’t know,” Eddie replies, a brow arched. “But that one seems like it’d be bigger.” He points towards the one in Richie’s left hand, biting back the smile that threatens to burst onto his face at Richie’s outraged expression.

“This eggplant hasn’t got shit on me. My dick overshadows this eggplant in every way.”

“Richie,” Eddie glances around them exasperatedly, making gestures that he hopes get the message across that this is a  _ grocery store _ . “Stop talking about your fucking dick in public.”

Of course, it’s at this moment that a woman passes with her small child, shooting him a look that is most definitely unimpressed. Her hands twitch like she’s one second away from clapping them right over her kids ears, which would be pretty dramatic, as far as he’s concerned. He glares at her until she passes, and then continues to glare at Richie for good measure.

“Yeah, Steve would probably kill me if I got arrested,” Richie has the good nature to wince, at least, scratching at the back of his neck. “I don’t think I could recover from a public indecency charge.”

Snorting, Eddie reaches around him to grab some courgettes, tossing them into the cart. “You could get one of those every time you leave the house.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re literally wearing a  _ pussy riot _ t-shirt.”

“Under a button up! You can only see the  _ sy ri _ ,” Richie waves a hand down at himself. “There’s nothing even remotely offensive about  _ sy ri _ .”

Someone, somewhere, could probably find something to be offended by when it comes to Richie, but Eddie just looks at his tee shirt for a moment, raises his brow again, and moves on. He’s learned to pick his battles. Chances are, if he leaves Richie alone for this, he could convince Richie to wear an actual, one-colored shirt for their dinner date on Friday. He has nothing against Richie’s sense of style; it’s grown on him, if anything. But Richie wearing a deep maeve slim fit shirt is something that Eddie’s had a great deal of fantasies about, and if he can make it a reality, he will. He’s human. It’s his number one goal this week.

They continue around the store, Eddie vetoing the amount of sugared treats Richie tries to slip into the cart behind his back, and filling up on an array of colourful vegetables and fruits instead. They have a small scuffle in the cereal aisle before putting in five different boxes of the stuff because they can’t agree on anything, and Richie ‘can’t be controlled by having to eat one thing for breakfast every day, it’s not normal, Eds’. It’s a compromise. Compromise isn’t something that Eddie’s historically been very good at, but maybe he’s learning, or maybe it’s just Richie - either way, he’s proud of himself for biting his tongue at the inclusion of  _ Lucky Charms _ .

It isn’t til halfway through the shop that Eddie realises that Richie’s gotten quieter. The usual soundtrack of his voice has ebbed into nothingness. There’s a twist of guilt there in the pit of his stomach for not noticing sooner, easily distracted by the process of grocery shopping. It’s probably nothing; he’s used to jumping to conclusions, needs to get a better hold of himself. But when they pass the baked goods without Richie trying to throw donuts in the cart, he knows that something is definitely wrong. The cart comes to a stop abruptly, and he peers at Richie with an expression of concern that he can’t fully mask, no matter how hard he tries.

“Have you swallowed your tongue?”

“Huh?”

“You never pass up glazed donuts,” Eddie narrows his eyes, looking Richie over.

Richie looks fine, to the untrained eye. But Eddie knows him. Sometimes, it hits him exactly how much he knows him, even after all this time, even after the years lost between them. He thinks Richie forgets too, like he thinks he can hide himself and his truth from Eddie. He can’t. He never could.

Richie is shifting from foot to foot, clear discomfort on his face, even when he smiles at Eddie now, looking at him like he doesn’t understand what Eddie’s getting at, and it makes Eddie a little mad, actually. Like, does Richie really think that Eddie doesn’t know him? Doesn’t pay attention to him like this? God, everything in Eddie’s life is Richie at the moment, and that’s probably pathetic and ridiculous and awful but he can’t really bring himself to give a shit. He’s  _ happy _ . They both are, he thinks, though right now, Richie doesn’t look it.

“I’m looking after my health,” Richie shrugs. “What can I say, you’re a good influence on me.”

“You’re full of shit.” Eddie scowls at him. “You think I don’t know you’re full of shit?”

Richie’s face drops, then, and Eddie steps closer without thinking, grip falling from the cart. “It’s nothing. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“Out of  _ what _ ?”

“Nothing! Forget I said anything.”

Tapping his foot on the ground, Eddie makes a frustrated sound, brows slanted. “You know I can’t. Just tell me.”

Shiftily, Richie looks around, like he’s scoping out the aisle. Eddie doesn’t get it. He can’t work out what it is that’s made Richie like  _ this _ suddenly - it’s like he gets when the paps are around, still fighting that ugly anxiety that they’re going to ask questions about That show, or ask him if he really went to rehab (big fat no, considering he was actually in Derry, but obviously nobody else knows that). But if it is the paps, he’d say it. He doesn’t hide that shit from Eddie. 

What Eddie’s left with is a big pile of nothing.

“Tell me what’s wrong, idiot,” he half growls. Extreme, maybe, but Richie sometimes requires extremes. “You look like you’ve just seen fucking Hockstetter or something.”

God. He finds himself hoping that’s not the case and then remembering, too slowly, that that can’t possibly be the case. Doesn’t slow the painful upbeat of his heart.

Richie sighs, taking what looks like serious effort to avoid Eddie’s eyes. “It’s nothing. Just some guy down there. Looking a little weirdly.”

“At  _ us _ ?”

“Yeah. Fuck it, it’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Eddie steps closer. His heart is running for a different reason now, and it’s still scary; he doesn’t know if it will ever stop being scary. But he reaches for Richie’s hand anyway, only allowing himself a split second of disappointment when Richie flinches before he remembers who they are and what this means, and who Richie has been his entire life.

It’s as new for Richie as it is for him, at least this part. Easy to forget that, though he makes a conscious effort not to.

“Rich,” he keeps his tone low, squeezing Richie’s hand in his own. “It’s fine. Fuck them. Don’t worry about it.”

It hurts him to see how uncertain Richie looks now, how weary his eyes seem. But they meet Eddie’s anyway, and Eddie wills his own to reflect something that will help - strength, power, courage. All of the things that he never thought he had but has found out in the last few months that he does.

“I love you. In private and in public.” He takes in a breath that he’s proud catches only slightly in his throat. “I don’t care about anyone else.”

“Yeah?” Richie’s voice is wary, too.

Eddie hates it. He wants to chase away any part of Richie that still feels like he’s not allowed this. He wants to hunt down every person who has ever made Richie feel like less than because of he’s always fucking been all along. He hates that Richie still feels like he has to hide, and he hates that Richie thinks, on some level at least, that Eddie is embarrassed of him. Or should be. He’s not sure which it is, but he knows it’s there, somewhere.

It’s easy to step further into Richie’s space, slowly like he’s moving towards a spooked animal. A deer caught in the headlights. With his shoulders hunched and his head down, Richie looks so much smaller than he is. He makes himself this way, Eddie’s noticed. Too often. He’s gotten better at occupying space, but there’s room for improvement, still. He doesn’t know how to make Richie see that the expanse of who he is is everything that Eddie wants.

He kisses him, right there beneath the too bright, artificial lights of the grocery store, in between the spices that permeate the air from their little glass bottles shelved uniformly. He should use his words, probably. He should say everything he wants to say - he will, later, when they’re in the comfort of their own, shared home that they call ‘ _ theirs _ ’ because it means something. He vows that he will. In this moment, though, a kiss can say a thousand words. Or so he hopes.

He wants this kiss to say: I’m proud of you and proud to be with you. We went through hell and back and there isn’t a chance that I’m going to let you live quietly after that, as someone who you aren’t. You want me to shout it from the rooftops? You want me to say it through a speakerphone? I will. I love you, and I’m yours, and everyone else can get fucked.

The sweetness of the kiss bleeds into it, the taste candied in his mouth. It’s all in his head, probably, some sort of placebo, but he marks it down as another of Richie’s tastes. As far as kisses go, it’s one of their more innocent ones, because they  _ are _ in a grocery store, and because this isn’t about the kiss as much as it’s about the symbolism, or something. Eddie’s  _ need _ to kiss is completely overshadowed by his need to show Richie that this is okay. That they are allowed to have this.

When they pull back, the look on Richie’s face tells him that he’s done the right thing.

“Come on,” he smiles, tangling their fingers. “We can get out of here if we finish up now.”

“Kissing in a grocery store... You’re scandalous, Kaspbrak. What will people  _ say _ ?”

“I will leave you here and change the fucking locks, Richie, don’t tempt me.”

\---

They don’t directly agree not to tell the rest of the losers about the fact that they’re together, but it’s an unspoken sort of mutual decision. At least, Eddie thinks it is. Richie hasn’t brought it up, but then he hasn’t either, so he doesn’t think he can read much into that.

It’s not that he doesn’t want them to know, or that he doesn’t trust them with this - if there’s anyone in the world he trusts, it’s going to be them. All of them. Unequivocally so, even if he might regret that one day (he doesn’t  _ think  _ he will, but stranger things have happened to them).

The issue - if there’s even an issue to discuss - is that he’s more worried that they’ll embarrass him by bringing up their childhood and how so obviously in love with Richie he was back then, even when he was too blinded to see it himself. It’s embarrassing. Even now that he knows that Richie felt the same way - even stronger, perhaps, when they were kids - he’s not sure he’s ready to experience the mortifying ordeal of being known by these people who are his family. They already know him. He wants to keep this for them for a little bit, before he has to face them and deal with getting red in the face and swearing at them all for being  _ immature _ about it.

If anything, he thinks they should be able to work it out for themselves.

The paps have photographed he and Richie together enough now that it should at least raise eyebrows, but he supposes that the losers all know that he’s living with Richie, and they know  _ them _ , so it’s nothing abnormal to see them pressed close together and squabbling over a sandwich ( _ Eddie’s _ sandwich that Richie had been trying to take a bite out of when he’d finished his own, because he’s grossly disgusting and not endearing in the slightest, obviously).

So, they don’t talk about it. Logically, Eddie knows that they should - they should have a conversation about this, about telling people, about  _ who _ they want to tell and  _ when _ , but Richie’s not bringing it up and Eddie is content to let it lie until he does. 

He just hopes that Richie isn’t embarrassed of him. It’s an unpleasant thought, leaves his chest constricted by anxiety and his stomach twisting like he’s going to throw up, but he’s practiced enough at dealing with these attacks by now that he knows how to let it pass. Unfortunately, he’s been having this thought very frequently lately. In the back of his mind, he knows that it’s unreasonable; he has no evidence to base the assumption on, and he has no leg on which to stand considering he’s not in a rush to go outing them either, but.

_ But _ .

It’s difficult, when half of him wants everyone to know that he loves Richie and Richie loves him back, and the other half of him wants them to have this to themselves for a little bit longer.

As far as dilemmas go, he reasons that it’s not the worst he could have.

Unfortunately, he loses his head more around Richie than he ever did before, and when things come to a head, he figures he should have expected it.

It starts with Richie at the kitchen table, tapping at the screen of his iPad to answer a group video call with the rest of the group, and it ends a little time later with Eddie, brushing a distracted and glaringly obvious kiss to the corner of Richie’s mouth when he’s halfway through an animated retelling of his latest meeting with his agent and his publicist that has Bev and Bill laughing raucously, and Ben watching on with horror from behind their respective cameras.

The laughing comes to a stop pretty quickly after that. 

By the time that Eddie’s mind catches up to his body, he’s stiff as a board and still curved towards Richie, their eyes meeting in a moment of brief panic. Richie’s stopped speaking, which Eddie can’t really blame him for considering he just fucking planted one on him like that in front of the friends, and they definitely did not discuss this beforehand, but in his defence, Richie smells like mahogany and teakwood and he looks positively charming when he’s being this enthusiastic about his own life.

“Uh-”

“What the fuck was that?”

“Was that a kiss?”

“Does anyone want to fill us in?”

“I  _ knew _ this would happen. Everyone here owes me ten dollars. Except for you, Richie and Eddie.”

Eddie feels frozen, stuck in time by his own stupid actions. His face is burning. He’s sure his neck is too, which the losers have a perfect view of from this angle. Looking at the screen feels like too much of an effort, and also might actually kill him, so he stares at Richie’s throat instead, wincing as he discerns the voices from one another by sound alone.

That last one was definitely Stan. Smug bastard.

Richie finds his voice faster than Eddie. “Were you guys betting on us? That’s fucking rude.”

If you weren’t listening for it, you wouldn’t be able to hear the tremor in his voice, or the underlying current of alarm to it, but Eddie’s perfectly attuned to everything that Richie is, so he hears it.

Richie’s eyes flick to his and yeah, that’s definitely worry.

Not for himself.

Eddie knows Richie well enough to know that this worry is for  _ him _ . 

Given that he hasn’t moved and probably looks like a badly crafted statue right now, Eddie figures that’s fair. He does feel a little like he’s going to leave his body and astral project into space any time now, and he doesn’t think he’d mind if he did. It would be a bit of a relief to be anywhere but here.

But all of that comes from the fear of embarrassment, and not anything else, and Richie’s worry is probably based on concern that Eddie’s going to freak out because they know, because he doesn’t want them to know, and he can’t let Richie think that, not even for a minute.

The losers are still talking, already beginning to get into the cajoling, by the time Eddie whips his head around. Ferociously. He hears a click in his neck but he perseveres anyway. “Yeah, yeah, yuck it up, dickheads! It’s not like we’re the only ones fucking behind everyone else’s back!”

He’s too busy scowling at Ben and Bev to really consider what he’s just said. At least, he is until it’s helpfully pointed out.

“Did you say  _ fucking _ ?”

“Are you two having sex now?” Mike looks positively gleeful from his grainy camera. They’ve been trying to convince him to upgrade to an iPhone for weeks now. “How long has this been going on?”

“Obviously they’re having sex-”

“We’re dating,” Eddie hears himself say, trying to sound calm and failing miserably. “We’re together. I’m dating Richie.”  _ Not having sex _ . Definitely not having sex. Not as far as he’s aware anyway, and he thinks he’d know if they were having sex, considering he’s thought about it and imagined it to be fucking incredible.

Richie shifts beside him, clearing his throat. “Can confirm. Eddie confessed his feelings for me in an incredibly romantic way and I felt too bad to say no.”

There’s a chorus of scoffs and scornful comments from the screen, which Eddie feels very vilified by, even as he adds in a karate chop of his own to Richie’s chest for good measure, smirking triumphantly at the camera where he can see the reflection of them, Richie rubbing at his tee shirt where the hit landed.

“We’re really happy for you guys,” Ben says earnestly.

Mike nods, the camera now uncomfortably close to his face. “Yeah, it’s about time. Guess things do work out in the end, huh?”

Yeah, Eddie thinks, still refusing to turn around, still looking at the pixelated version of himself and Richie on the screen, both of them wearing smiles. Yeah, they do. Even for people like them,

“So when Richie mentions his boyfriend in his stand up now, we can assume that’s about you?” Bev grins at Eddie. It’s devious. He doesn’t like it. “The stories are about you?”

“I guess…” Eddie says slowly, twisting to look at Richie for confirmation. Richie isn’t looking at him now, purposely, which is even more suspicious. He dislikes this even more. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing…” Bev hums.

It’s Stan who smiles at the camera coolly, not an ounce of emotion crossing his face when he drops the bomb. “Richie’s been sending us snippets of his new writing. We thought the boyfriend was just made up, but…”

“We should have known,” Bill pipes up, looking thoughtful. “Looking back… it makes sense, doesn’t it? Richie did use the word neurotic.”

Without a word, Eddie shoves Richie off the chair they’ve both squeezed onto, using the element of surprise to overpower him where he usually wouldn’t be able to, satisfied with the loud  _ thump _ that follows the flailing limbs.

When he looks down at Richie on the floor, his shirt rucked up and his hair curling at the ends from air drying, he has to fight down the urge to get down there with him and kiss him senseless. It’s a constant battle, he laments to himself, but even worse in moments like these, when Richie looks so inviting and so absolutely  _ his _ that Eddie wants to crawl inside him and stay there forever.

Sometimes, home can be a person. 

Sometimes, he thinks, turning back to the screen, it can be multiple people.

\---

It’s been a few weeks since they started sleeping in the same bed, a few weeks since Eddie started instigating kisses left, right and centre, and a few weeks since he discovered that kissing might actually be the best thing in the world, and he’s upset that he’s been missing out on this for such a vast part of his life. Not that he would have wanted to be doing this with Myra - or anyone else, really. It’s not hard for him to come to the conclusion that kissing is good now because it’s Richie he’s kissing. With anyone else, it probably wouldn’t be half as good - which means that, obviously, Eddie has to do everything in his power to make sure that Richie stays his for the rest of their lives.

Within reason. He’s not going to become his fucking mother,  _ trapping _ Richie where he doesn’t want to be, but he doesn’t think he has to worry about that. Not any time soon, at least. He catches Richie looking at him sometimes when he thinks he’s looking the other way, and his expression is always so curiously open, his eyes filled with a mixture that Eddie can only describe as awe and wonder.

It’s insane to be looked at like that. It sends the blood rushing to his face, his skin abuzz with a restless energy that he never knows what to do with. Usually, it presents itself in kissing, now. Touching, if he can’t get close enough to get their lips attached. He feels like he could break out of his skin and explode into a million pieces, and the only way to stop it is to get some sort of contact with Richie.

He has a fucking hair trigger now. One look, and he’s throwing himself across the table, the couch, the bed, getting his greedy little fingers all over Richie’s face and chest and stomach, his insatiable lips on his neck, his jaw, his ears.

It’s a real inconvenience to his life, actually. Sure, it’s nice to know that he has a sex drive after so many years of believing that he didn’t, and it’s definitely nice to be able to get his hands on Richie at any given moment, but Eddie would like to have a little bit of control back over his body and his mind, please. He would like to feel that he at least has some say over what he does, but honestly, his head is just full of static, low and humming whenever Richie so much as  _ looks  _ at him now.

Mornings have always been fucking miserable, but these days they are shades of muted warmth and orange hues. Waking up next to Myra was clinical; gray, if he had to pick a color for it. They never touched in bed, not unless they were planning on taking it further, breaking whatever dry spell they’d been going through. Richie’s the opposite of that. He’s like a koala, wrapping himself around Eddie the moment he slides into bed and refusing to let go. Like he knows, maybe, that for all of Eddie’s protests, he doesn’t really  _ want _ him to let go.

The usual grogginess is there when he wakes up today, pinching his brow against the stream of light that’s coming in through the window, seeping in between the blinds that someone (Richie) apparently didn’t close properly last night, and he has half a mind to bitch at him for it, opening his eyes and mouth like he’s about to and -

Richie is already awake. There’s nothing unusual about that; of the two of them, Eddie is the one who hates mornings, who hates the process of waking up, who spends the first hour of every day ambling around and helping himself to copious amounts of coffee, because after forty years he hasn’t figured out a better way of staying awake than that. Lots and lots of caffeine.

But Richie is awake and looking directly at him.

His hair is mussed from sleep, the curled ends messy around his face, and he’s smiling at Eddie even now that he’s caught. It’s unbearably tender, and Eddie finds himself caught there, unable to do anything except stare back.

Waking up next to Richie feels like coming home. Nobody ever said that it could be this way, but he’s glad that he’s finally discovering it for himself.

“What?” He closes one eye tiredly, face half smushed into the down pillow beneath his head, words coming out muffled. “Wha’ are you looking at?”

From his one eyed vision, he sees Richie’s smile broaden. “A very grumpy man by the sounds of it.”

“I’m not grumpy,” Eddie says, knowing that he does, in fact, sound incredibly grumpy. “I’m tired.”

“You’ve slept for, like, eight hours.”

“And? It’s a Saturday. Everyone knows you get an extra hour on Saturday’s.”

Although, he’s awake now, so the likelihood of getting back to sleep is slim.

It’s fine. Whatever. He finds himself moving further into the warmth between them, emitting from both of their bodies, sliding right on in there until his toes hit Richie’s shin, and he slips a leg innocuous between Richie’s. Not pressing, not even really touching, but just  _ there _ . It’s nice, like this, he thinks. Always nice when there’s skin on skin and he can’t really tell where one of them ends and the other begins.

“I’m going to make coffee,” Richie says. He doesn’t move.

Eddie blinks at him. “Okay.”

“Soon.”

“Whenever you want, sweetheart.”

It’s a little mean of him to break that out so early, when he knows his voice is sleep husky and he looks soft like this, rumpled up against the sheets, one of the only times he lets himself look less than put together. But he can’t help it. He loves the effect it has on Richie - the way he thinks he could hear his heartbeat if he listened close enough, drumming an unsteady beat against his ribcage. The way the pink rises high to his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose unbidden. The way he swallows, loud and dry in the morning air, the swell of his Adams’ apple drawing Eddie’s attention to his throat like a moth to light.

“Not fair,” Richie sounds just as hoarse now. Not for the first time, Eddie is reminded that he did that. That he is the one who can do this, who  _ get _ to do this. “It’s not even 10 am, you have to play fair.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Eddie grumbles. Despite his words, he shifts closer, smoothing his fingers over Richie’s cheek, revelling in how hot his face is to touch. “You don’t like it, sweetheart?”

Cruel, it would be, if Richie didn’t know exactly how to get Eddie back.

“You know I do, baby,” he says, and he’s smiling - a big, shit-eating smile that Eddie  _ hates _ and wants to taste. “You know.”

_ Baby _ .

Eddie wants to hate it. He wants to scoff and roll his eyes and bite at Richie’s jaw for even presuming to drop such a name, but it’s not the first time, and as heat rolls low in his stomach, he prays it won’t be the last, either. It’s gentle from Richie, even when he’s saying it for revenge, to get the kind of reaction from Eddie that Eddie wants from him.

Fine. A game isn’t a game without two participants, anyway,

Not that he doesn’t have even deeper ulterior motives than that when he closes the gap between them, the sleep-sweet scent of Richie’s breath mingling with his own. Richie is  _ shirtless _ , for one, dark, thick curls peeking out from the blanket where it’s not quite pulled up enough to cover his chest. He presses his hand to Richie’s sternum, flat and heavy, biting back a smile at the sharp intake of breath that Richie follows the action with. Eddie gets his fingers in the hair across his chest, rubbing without pulling, and then he leans forward to kiss the knife’s edge of Richie’s jaw.

He takes his time - not just because he knows that Richie hates and loves it when he does, but because he wants to revel in it. Wants to commit it to memory, even though there’s plenty of kisses and moments like this up in there already. He doesn’t want to forget anything that they do. Sue him. He’s a fucking romantic now.

Richie’s chest dips and peaks beneath him with his heavy breaths, and Eddie takes some pity on him, speeding up the last stretch of open skin across his jaw so that he can get to his lips quicker.

Richie tastes like sleep, traces of toothpaste left over from the night before when they’d brushed together side by side in their en suite bathroom. Eddie licks across his teeth and sucks the tip of his tongue into his mouth, humming in the back of his throat out of sheer pleasure. If he opened his eyes, he knows he could count Richie’s eyelashes up this close. If he imagines it enough, he thinks he can feel them pressed against the swell of his own cheeks, their noses smashed together in a way that is both uncomfortable and not enough.

It’s too early for anything more. The kiss becomes something sweeter, the pants become less audible, and then it’s just them, pressing their lips together over and over again like neither of them know how to pull apart just yet. Eddie’s grateful that it’s not just him.

Eventually, he drops his head back onto his pillow, but doesn’t move any further away. Richie’s eyes are wide, his pupils blown, and Eddie can feel his own pulse reverberating through his entire body. 

“I haven’t brushed my teeth,” Richie blinks.

Eddie scrunches his nose. “I don’t care.”

As he says it, he realises that he really doesn’t. Which is - something. It’s something, for someone who would never kiss his wife without them both having brushed their teeth and flossed first, for someone who hates morning breath and the other faculties of personal hygiene that prove to be the bane of his existence.

Yet again, Richie is the exception to the rule. It’s incredibly discomfiting to realise that Richie’s morning breath, whilst not exactly  _ fresh _ , is something that Eddie wouldn’t mind tasting over and over again.

Richie’s smile is back when he looks over at him again. He looks like he’s just figured something out, like Eddie’s just let him in on a secret that only the two of them know. A layer of misty haze coats his eyes, Eddie watching as his tongue swipes to wet his lower lip.

“I love you,” he says.

Eddie knows he’ll never tire of hearing it.

He burrows down into the comfort of the bed, pressing his face fully into the pillow, and returns the sentiment wholeheartedly. “I love you, too, idiot.”

He doesn’t need to say it; he thinks he already did somehow this morning. But he does anyway. 

Richie gets out of bed and Eddie immediately misses him.

“I’m not making you coffee unless you’re up in the next ten minutes, Eds. I’m cracking the whip. Shake a leg, cowboy.”

Eddie throws a pillow in his direction like a missile. He dodges it, obviously, because he’s got like a sixth sense with these things apparently, despite having next to no athletic ability as a kid.

It’s unfair. He might be pouting a little as he watches Richie leave, but at least there’s nobody around to catch it.

Richie’s voice is distant from the kitchen, but still audible when he says, “You must really love me, huh?”

_ God _ . Eddie lies there for a minute longer, stewing in his own frustration, before he shoves the sheets of the bed off with not a single iota of grace, getting even more tangled up in them along the way.

“No,” he shouts, kicking at the sheets frustratedly as he gets out of bed. “I hate you and I’m going to come and kill you!”

Even as he says it, the ‘l’s turn into ‘s’s in his own traitorous mind. 

\---

The problem is, Richie’s  _ hot _ .

Objectively, he’s an attractive man. Maybe not in the classic way, not in the Hollywood movie star way, but Eddie’s never given a shit about that sort of attractiveness anyway. Nice to look at, maybe, but not eliciting any stronger emotion within him than that: just… pleasant.

Richie makes him feel like he’s been set on fire by the power of a thousand suns.

Attraction had always been something of a foreign concept to Eddie - he’d chased it, or at least the idea of it, but it was never something that he had truly felt back then. Looking back, he thinks that you could argue that he never  _ allowed _ himself to feel it, because allowing himself to be attracted to someone would have definitely made him more aware of his less than heterosexual proclivities earlier on in life, when he wasn’t as equipped to deal with the terrifying truth of that.

He’s equipped now. Like, fully equipped. He has the tools to deal with it, and he’s ready to hammer away at his own gayness for the rest of his life with Richie next to him doing exactly the same. When Eddie says this aloud, Richie laughs at ‘ _ hammer away _ ’ and makes the exact sort of joke that Eddie knew he would before he’d even said it, and they end up kissing on the sofa in an extremely gay way, and Eddie’s never been happier.

So, it’s fine - the sexuality thing. He wonders if he  _ should _ have had some sort of crisis about it; if not having one means that he will later down the line, years after actually coming out and doing something about it. At least if that does happen, he knows that Richie will be there to help him through it. He hopes it doesn’t, though.

The point is, there hasn’t been any need for him to  _ come to terms _ with being gay. It’s like (and he’d said this, too, to Richie once, when they were lying in bed with the moonlight casting shadows around the bedroom, lazily awake) he just woke up one day and he could see clearly. That’s down to remembering, to finding the losers again - to finding  _ Richie _ again. It’s strange to think that he’d been living blind before that, but he knows it’s true. The life he had built for himself in New York with Myra feels miles away now, belonging to another time and another man - another Eddie Kaspbrak who should never have been.

Eddie has no issue with being gay. His issues resolve almost wholly around the fact that Richie is just out there looking like that and Eddie’s supposed to be - what, exactly?  _ Okay _ with it? Pretending like he isn’t about to lose his goddamn mind every time Richie ties his hair a certain way when he’s concentrating, or when he wears that ratty, old tour t-shirt with the holes that hint at the smallest sliver of pale skin smattered with coarse hair?

Or like right now, when he’s just returned home after his run, the warmth of the house reacting with the outside colder temperatures still caught on his skin, his breath labored less from the exercise and more from the sight before him.

It isn’t like he hasn’t seen Richie naked before - or at least half naked. Full nudity hasn’t been factored into their living arrangements yet, though Eddie is definitely not adverse to discussing it some time soon, the thought sending a swooping, tugging sensation to his stomach that’s almost like a magnet, pulling him towards Richie now.

He’s seen Richie in various states of undress, but seeing Richie with just his boxers on is different, somehow, to seeing Richie freshly out of the shower and covered by only a towel, wrapped around his waist. A small towel. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Eddie resists the urge to wipe at his own mouth, legitimately half worried that he might find himself drooling. His mouth is  _ watering _ even as he swallows it down again.

For a moment, he laments how difficult his life is.  _ This _ is what he has to deal with on a daily basis.

He’s never been so sexually frustrated in his life. He didn’t even know it was  _ possible _ to be this sexually frustrated.

“Oh, hey, Eds,” Richie says, casual like he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing to Eddie right now. Probably, he doesn’t. He shakes his hair out, droplets of water dripping down the valley between his pectoral muscles, and Eddie can do nothing but follow the movement with his gaze.

Richie continues, grinning mischievously. “Nice shorts. Where’d you get them? The kids section?”

Richie knows damn well Eddie didn’t get them in the kids section, and he’s only saying this to piss Eddie off. Eddie  _ knows _ this, but still he gets his hackles up, marching across the room like a man on a mission. Problem is, he doesn’t know what that mission is until he gets there.

“They’re perfectly acceptable running attire, jackass,” he hisses at Richie when he’s only a few feet away, hoping that the full power of his ire is evident in his eyes as he glares at him.

“Sure, if you wanna show your whole ass to the world. You’re gonna cause a crash one of these days, Eds.”

He’s teasing; riling him up on purpose.

Nonsensically, Eddie replies. “Oh, like you’re one to talk!”

In his head, it makes perfect sense. Out loud, however...he winces, seeing the exact moment that confusion marred with delight crosses over Richie’s face, his lips twitching at the corner like he’s not sure what reaction he’s supposed to have yet.

“Shut up,” Eddie scowls.

“Didn’t say anything,” Richie is definitely amused now, leaning up against the wall. 

“Not one word,” Eddie hisses at him, poking at his chest with one finger.

He’s a maniac. He knows he’s a maniac and he knows that Richie knows this, so maybe that’s why he’s not trying to hide it anymore. Richie is looking at him with the most glee that Eddie thinks he’s ever seen on his face, and Eddie wants to wipe it right off.

So, he does the logical thing, obviously. He kisses him.

Look, he never meant for it to become a  _ thing _ , kissing Richie when he wants him to shut up, or kissing him when he wants to distract him, or kissing him just to feel like he still has the upperhand from time to time. But he has a thing for kissing Richie in general, and these aren’t the only reasons he does it. He figures it’s allowed.

It’s slick and hot from the get go this time, nothing even remotely innocent about it, and Eddie is proud of himself for holding back the groan he wants to emit as soon as he gets to taste Richie again.

He pushes closer and closer until Richie has no choice but to stop pressed up against the wall with nowhere else to go, and Eddie might feel guilty about it if he wasn’t so sure that Richie doesn’t actually care in the slightest. He fits a heavy, searing hand around the back of Eddie’s neck and there’s no hiding the keening sound that he makes this time, lost somewhere in Richie’s own mouth.

It’s a dream. It’s all of his dreams. He trails his fingers along Richie’s body, exploring the dips and curves of his torso, sliding one hand slowly down from his chest to his stomach, halting only when he reaches the top of the towel slung low on Richie’s hips.

A part of him wants to carry on. Another part of him thinks that he shouldn’t.

Like this, with his thighs practically bare (because  _ yes _ , the shorts are fucking short), Richie’s towel is rough against his skin, the sensation in juxtaposition to the gentleness with which Richie touches him. The hand on his neck presses down with a little bit of pressure, maneuvering Eddie slightly so as to get the angle right, and he moans again, high pitched and desperate as one of Richie’s knees finds its way between his legs, pressing up against him and  _ oh _ , he’s hard.

Pleasure and embarrassment shoot through him, both the same in the moment. He moves, unsure if he’s trying to get closer or trying to pull away, but he brushes up against Richie with the action, and that’s definitely Richie’s dick. Definitely Richie’s  _ hard _ dick through the towel, digging into his hip bone. Eddie’s eyes roll back into his fucking skull.

He bites at Richie’s lip as Richie pulls back, letting his head drop against the wall with a thunk. Even with the kiss broken, Eddie isn’t quite ready to stop. Not when he has this - a half naked Richie in front of him, everything he thinks he’s ever wanted.

It’s a semi-bruising kiss that he begins to suck into the paper thin skin at Richie’s throat, listening to the pants and whines that Richie looses from his chest above him, bodies undulating together where they’re connected at every possible place they could be, and it’s too much. It’s not enough. Eddie wants to step away and he wants to never have to leave this spot right here, his head spinning with Richie.

Richie’s body against his; Richie’s taste in his mouth; Richie’s scent surrounding him and leaving him foggy headed. Richie’s hardness that’s begging to be touched, if Eddie’s own white hot pleasure is anything to go by. It’s a current that runs down his spine, shuddering against Richie from just this; his teeth on Richie’s neck, tongue laving at the sensitive spot he’s carved out there for himself.

He presses his lips there in a silent apology, in a vow, in a secret only they know.

“Not that this isn’t great,” Richie breathes, throat clicking, voice pitched higher. “But if you don’t stop, I won’t stop, and then we’ll really have a big mess to clean up.”

Eddie laughs breathlessly, pressing his head into the crook of Richie’s neck. With his hands on Richie’s sides still, he tilts his hips backwards, putting some distance between their lower regions, because he might actually blow, coming in his pants like a teenager, and he doesn’t think he’s alone in this situation.

When he raises his head, Richie is looking at him assessingly.

“Well, that was a nice greeting. Should I walk around like this more often?”

It’s a question. There’s uncertainty there, maybe even some level of insecurity, and Eddie doesn’t understand how Richie can’t see it - surely, he knows the effect he has on Eddie by now. He’s literally just  _ felt it _ , and Eddie knows he’s not exactly packing, but he’d be pretty fucking offended if Richie couldn’t feel his fully erect dick.

But it’s about Richie who doesn’t see himself the way that Eddie sees him. Eddie hates whoever made Richie feel smaller than he is and less than he’s always been, but at least now he has time to start unpicking that damage.

“Not unless you want me to jump you,” Eddie rolls his eyes. “You’re driving me crazy.”

“I mean, that’s literally exactly what I want,” Richie laughs, pushing away from the wall. It looks like it takes effort, like his legs might not be so steady, and pride swells in Eddie’s chest. “But, uh. Maybe not like this.”

Eddie nods. “Maybe not.”

He gets it. He knows what Richie wants. Something special and meaningful, as corny as that sounds. Eddie wants it too. But he also wants to get off, like, right fucking now, so he side steps Richie to slip into the bathroom behind him.

“You won’t mind if I just deal with this, then,” he says sweetly before the door closes, gesturing towards his very prominent erection.

From outside, he hears the moment Richie’s head hits the wall again, accompanied by a deep, agonised sounding groan.

\---

It’s a Saturday night in Chicago, and the wintry wind whistles through the streets beyond the walls that currently house Eddie.

Chicago Winters aren’t so different from New York Winters, he thinks, but there is one glaringly obvious distinction, and that’s that he has Richie this year. The holiday season was never something he was as enamored with as everyone else, preferring to let it pass in a blaze of crowded places and false cheer, more relieved when it was over and done with.

This year, he’s surprised himself by getting caught up in the holiday spirit. Early, even. It’s early December and he’s already worn three Christmas sweaters to the office, where nobody has ribbed him for it because nobody knew the Eddie he used to be. It’s nice. There’s tinsel strung around the computers, and Richie’s been trying to convince Eddie to get the decorations out at home for the past five days now - he’s close to giving in, and it isn’t just to get Richie to shut up about it.

It’s the fact that it’s his first year with someone he truly loves, in a house that they call their together home, and maybe he wants to see it strung up with pretty fucking fairy lights, with a giant fuck off tree taking up an entire corner of their lounge. He wants to bake Christmas cookies in the kitchen with Richie, getting flour in their hair and batter on their face, and he wants to watch god awful Christmas movies that will still make him cry, because he finally  _ gets it _ .

For now, though, he’s stood backstage in a small comedy venue, with Richie doing one of his first stand up shows since he’s ‘reinvented’ himself, as the gossip websites say. He hasn’t reinvented himself at all. He’s just become who he was always supposed to be - like a fucking Pokemon evolution, or something (Richie’s words, obviously).

Eddie never thought he’d be proud to see Richie standing up there sweating profusely under the bright fluorescent lights and leaving it all on the stage for the world to see. Or the audience to see. Whatever. It’s a lot, is the thing.

He’s talking about him.

Exaggerating stories about their time together so far, sure, but it’s still him. It’s still  _ them _ at the core of it all. And maybe Eddie’s biased, but he can hear the love in Richie’s voice, the outpouring of emotion that he feels for him and it’s incredible. Unbelievable, maybe, if he hadn’t been on the receiving end of it for the past few months.

He thinks of them as kids, swimming in the water of the quarry, he on Richie’s shoulders trying to shove Bill off of Stan’s. Before the clown; before Ben and Bev and Mike, even. Back then, everything had felt like nothing could possibly go wrong. They spent their days running from Bowers’ gang, but everything else was fair game. Leaving was inevitable; all of them had dreams of saying goodbye to Derry.

They’d just always imagined they’d do it together, in the end.

It’s a special kind of date, Eddie thinks, that brings them together now. This, them being together, it was written in the stars, predetermined in their fates from birth, something unescapable. He wouldn’t want to even if he could.

He watches Richie finish his set, waiting in the wings with electricity running through his blood, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Jeez Louise, that was a hell of a show, huh, Eds?” Richie’s all smiles and tired eyes when he slips backstage, hands catching Eddie at the waist right before he barrels into him.

He looks proud of himself. The last fragments of Eddie’s heart shattered from a lifetime of disenchantment glue back together with that look on Richie’s face.

“Yeah, Rich, it was.” He says. He gets his hands around Richie’s sweaty face. Gross. It’s super gross, his hands already wet from it, but he doesn’t care. He pulls him down and in for a kiss anyway.

The salt of Richie’s sweat is stinging on his tongue, licking away at the thin sheen of moisture across Richie’s top lip, spilling everything into it that he still isn’t sure he can say.

He pulls back, their foreheads pressed together, sharing each other’s breath. “I love you, sweetheart.”

The twist of Richie’s mouth is amused. “I was that good, huh?”

Eddie shakes his head on a laugh. “No. I mean, yeah. But it’s just you, asshole. It’s just you.”

It always has been. He knows this now. He doesn’t believe much in destiny; or he didn’t. But there’s something about him and Richie, two lines fated to cross. At the point where they meet, he isn’t sure what the world expected. It was always going to be love, though, for them.

“Let’s go home,” Richie says against his lips and it feels like a promise.

_ Home. _

Eddie reaches for his hand and he doesn’t look back.  _ Fuck _ looking back. He has everything he could need here and, for once, the future looks bright.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! all comments and kudos etc are appreciated, i love to hear from you guys :')
> 
> i'm over on twitter at [@decdlights](https://twitter.com/decdlights) if you wanna follow/reach out, whatever, i'm pretty active over there as i am permanently stuck here now!!


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